Information Age has named Essbase one of the top ten innovations of the past ten years.
Hyperion Essbase was ranked in the top 10 along with Netscape, Blackberry, Google, virtualisation, Voice Over IP (VOIP), Linux, XML, the Pentium processor and ADSL.Writing in Information Age's 10th anniversary issue, editor Kenny MacIver said: "Hyperion Essbase was the multi-dimensional database technology that put online analytical processing on the business intelligence map. It has spurred the creation of scores of rival OLAP products -- and billions of OLAP cubes."
I don't know about billions, but there's gotta be a bunch of them out there.
A this juncture I've been thinking of two possibilities with regard to the future of BI. Clearly the OLAP paradigm is alive and will continue, but you've got to wonder what Google has up their sleeve. So let us imagine that there's a way to tweak Google appliances to watch intranet traffic in a way that's referenceable. So meta-BI can assist. I'd watch their lexical parsing stuff for new possibilities even though I don't see a practical demand for it.
Secondly, I think we are just about to reach the point at which data mining (first visually, then with sampling) is going to become a bit more mainstream. The reason for this is that Essbase snd MSAS are about to scale past a significant cognitive barrier - which is all the dimensions you can think about. Recall that in 1992, a 1GB datawarehouse was considered pretty big. At least it did for the DB2 mainframe guys. Now that corporate IT understands what it can do, requirements are coming from the grassroots which are more sophisticated. (Finally). We are clearly at the point where best practitioners are not afraid of these requests, and DW shouldn't fail as miserably as it has.
What's going to emerge is the *real* path which is Active Data Warehousing, the stuff that Teradata has been all over. From this, we're going to get some archtypical models for analysis in every industry. I myself am publishing some models within my practice next month. We're getting an infrastructure guy and we're going to have some nice boilerplate stuff to merge up with Hackett's benchmarks. It's going to be fairly awesome as we start belting out models in a variety of customers.
I'm not supposed to talk about the next generation platform from Hyperion, but I'll just say this: The OLAP wars are over. The next 18 months is going to be the end of it. Now it's all about TCO and plug & play. That's what I said, plug & play OLAP. Or as IBM would say OLAP 'On Demand'. The learning curve is about to go flat.
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